Edgar Allen Poe nearly put his famous refrain in the beak of a very different bird entirely.

When he first lit on the idea that "nevermore" would repeat itself throughout his poem, he imagined it issuing from a human speaker, but, devising no elegant means for a rational person to senselessly repeat the word, he settled rather on attributing the line to an irrational animal. The first to suggest itself was naturally the parrot, but, as Poe writes in The Philosophy of Composition, that bird was "superseded forthwith by a Raven as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone." Indeed, it's hard to imagine the same poem beneath slightly comic title The Parrot.